Customer Reviews

Acronis Disk Director Suite 10.0 [Old Version]

5 star:		(24)
4 star:		(10)
3 star:		(8)
2 star:		(6)
1 star:		(25)

 

 

This is probably the worst software I've used in years--probably in the last decade. If you are using old operating systems or old hardware, you may be fine, but with XP64 or Vista on the latest hardware, it repeatedly corrupted my hard drive partions rendering them not only unbootable but generally unrecoverable. Another bug is that my wireless mouse would only work during the first welcome/splash screen of the boot CD but not the actual utility once it loaded. I had to hook up a PS/2 mouse. Even that didn't work all of the time (like when I had a 2nd drive plugged in).

Aside from the hardware problems, it plain destroyed partitions and corrupts MBRs. I'll give you some examples. Resize NTFS cluster sizes renders Windows completely unbootable and corrupted. Changing drive letters renders the system unbootable. Setting a partition active corrupts the drive. Performing operations on an external USB drive completely corrupted the drive, and I couldn't fix with any other DOS/Windows utilities that I had. I had to fix it on my Mac! Note that you cannot clone a drive or partition. You can only copy a partition which assigns the wrong drive letter and as noted above you cannot correct without losing all the data. Many operations require multiple reboots for each step involved and some steps fail/crash. Sometimes, it would set the wrong partition active. Finally, copying partitions from one drive to another failed inexplicably and crashed about 1/2 the time. The only operations I was consistently successful at were trivial operations like partition resizes which Vista does natively anyway. Operations that I could do in their "demo" (it is NOT a trial) are fake. They could not be performed using the real software which was the latest version. Please note that my system is otherwise stable and all the native Vista disk utilities/operations work flawlessly. I have used disk utilities like Partition Magic, Norton Ghost, Drive Image, etc., for decades so I am not a newbie.

The final reason for 1 star (zero if I could ), I purchased this direct from Acronis via Digital River. Their support is horrible (basically auto-replies) if they ever respond. Despite having a 30-day money back guarantee, you will never see your money again. This product sets new lows in the already shaky computer hardware/software industry.

I have been selling computer and network systems since 1977 (Apple II's) to start. Rarely have I seen such a POS released to market before it was completely designed and tested. I have been back and forth with Acronis no less than 12 times on different bugs. While I am a thorough tester, this software works acceptably only if all you need is to resize and move partitions - DO NOT INSTALL - run only from the CD. Again, don't install it or use it on a new, out of the box Dell either! It has major incompatibilities with certain Dell Factory installed hardware, card reader, Bluetooth, etc. when running Vista - Installed it and BSOD immediately upon reboot! Acronis finally admitted a problem with their SnapAPI drivers and supplied a patch that can't be found anywhere on their website or in their FAQs. Nice, but that, in turn, killed the OS Bootloader used for multiple OS selection - nothing can be recognized after the patch. Bottom line: Acronis is trying to milk the customer with this product by releasing it before it is beyond anything other than a Beta 1.0 version. Additionally, the CD in the box was outdated (Build 2077) and the current build is 2160 - 2 months lag! That should tell you a bit about the continued design of this "Beta" within Acronis. Do they tell you any of this in their FAQ... not a word, you have to submit a support ticket and if you are lucky, 4 or 5 days later they tell you your version is not registered - WHEN OURS WAS FROM THE MINUTE WE PURCHASED IT. Save your self grief, OS crashes, Data Loss, Frustration etc. and purchase something else or wait until Aconis acts like a reputable real manufacture and releases products AFTER they are thoroughly tested and ready for market, rater than trying to "milk" profits from the unsuspecting purchasers - most of whom won't have the detailed technical knowledge to target the problem as Acronis' and then allow Acronis to tell them "it's their hardware" - IT ISN'T - It's Acronis Disk Director Suite 10 Ver Beta.POS ! - Questions? email me at pos-at-ladishes-dot-com. I'd be happy to provide you with the thread and reams of correspondence I've had with Acronis. What a joke and a waste of time. I wonder how many of their other products are designed under this same philosophy of release for sale at Beta 1?

Not worth a penny. Terrible product, full of bugs. Tried using the Disk Partition utility on two separate machines, got all sorts if imaginary errors, none of which is true!!! Here is a case although not the only one:
>> Error:
>> E000101F4: Acronis Disk Director Suite has detected unsupported hard
>> disk Drives. Acronis Disk Director Suite does not support Windows
>> Dynamic Disks, EZ-Drives, etc.

Reply from Acronis support follows:

First of all we recommend you to download and install the latest build (2160) of Acronis Disk Director Suite 10.0 available at http://www.acronis.com/homecomputing/my/updates/ and test it.
>
> Acronis Disk Director Suite 10.0 supports RAID arrays. You can perform all available operations with partitions located on RAID volumes without any special precautions. Please note that Acronis Disk Director Suite 10.0 does not support Windows LDM (dynamic disks).
>
> Download the latest SnapAPI archive file from http://download.acronis.com/support/SnapAPI_l_s_e.zip
> Unpack the archive and install the unpacked MSI package and check if that fixes the problem.
>
> If the issue remains we need some additional information.
>
> 1) Could you please download Acronis Report utility available at http://download.acronis.com/support/AcronisReport.exe and run it, create a report and send it to us? Please compress the Acronis Report output file into an archive (e.g. with WinZip) and attach to your message by browsing for the archive. This would provide us with detailed information on the hard disk partition structure.

My hard disk is as simple as it gets, a brand new HP/Media Center and another one running plain XP.
None of their suggestions worked and ultimately I gave up on it as I had to restore after each try.

This product is promoted as easy and safe to use. I used it to reallocate space from by D: drive to my C: drive and now have lost either my access to D: or, worse yet, the files themselves! I have years of digital photos and hundreds of iTunes downloads that I fear are lost. The response from their support team was of no help. Beware.

We bought Disk Director for one reason: We had a computer running WinXP SP2 with 70GB of data on a 111GB HD in one partition and we wanted to split it into smaller partitions. So I'll be commenting on its ability to do that one thing. I haven't used it for anything else. I'll summarize here and go into detail below: The User's Guide didn't work, the program failed to work within Windows, and it was unable to split a partition, even when run from the boot disk. It was able to resize a partition when run from the boot disk.

We downloaded the program, we didn't buy it in a package, so the first thing we wanted to do was print the User's Guide. It didn't work, so we had to download the User's Guide separately from their web site. Strike One. We ran the program from within Windows, and it's really simple to understand, even in manual (non-automatic) mode. We ran through the process of splitting the drive initially into 2 partitions with some data in each; it was very simple, and after about 30 minutes, it SAID we were finished and that the disk was now 2 partitions. EXCEPT the disk was really still in exactly the same state as when we started: one partition of 111GB. Strike Two! So, we ran the program from the boot disk we had made earlier. The interface seems to be the same as with Windows, and we began the process of splitting the drive into 2 partitions. Unfortunately, when we got to the part where we told it how big to make each partition, instead of doing that, it went back to the screen where you choose what job you want to do (split, resize, merge, etc). So we tried again, choosing different sizes for the 2 partitions we wanted. Again, it went back to the aforementioned screen. No error message, no indication of any problem, it just didn't do what it was supposed to. Strike Three! Finally, I decided to try the resize function. We had 70GB of data on the drive, so I was able to resize the partition to 71GB, leaving 40gb unallocated, then used Windows control panel to create a 40GB partition. Then we went thru a similar operation to create a third partition. Disk Director may be able to do a lot of other things, I don't know, but one of its "new features" is supposed to be splitting partitions, and it absolutely failed at that.

Update: I decided to try Disk Director on another computer with another situation. This computer was running WinXP SP2, and had a non-system disk that was 250gb in one partition with no data. I wanted to split up this huge partition. I didn't even try to run Disk Director from within Windows, I went straight to the boot disk. I split the partition into two partitions, but then changed my mind and decided to merge them again. No luck. When I got to the point in the process where I told it which partitions I wanted to merge (there were only 2), it just sat and did nothing. The "commit" icon was grayed out; it wasn't an option. I tried over and over in different ways to merge those 2 partitions, and the result was the same every time; it seemed to be waiting for something. Finally, I decided to try running Disk Director from Windows. This time, I was able to merge the partitions with no problem!

So, on the first computer, the program wouldn't work at all in Windows, and was able to do only some things I tried from the boot disk. On the second computer, it performed only some operations from the boot disk, and some others from within Windows. This software can do some things it says, but it's definitely flaky and unreliable.

I am a veteran user of Disk Partitioning software such as Partition Magic 8.0 and Drive Image and have found Acronis Disk Director v 10 and True Image 9.0 to be excellent programs. Interface is very good and the software works reliably.

However, with some newer computers (using SATA HDs) it fails to detect the hard drive. Fortunately Partition Magic 8.0 works with these machines. Tech support, is not very helpful. They e-mailed detailed and extremely long instructions and complicated Linux commands so that system info could be saved to USB flash drive. It was pretty incomprehensible and I could not get it to work. Next they asked me to take photos of the screen, scrolling it one page at a time. The command to scroll the screen one page at a time simply did not work. I think it is asking way too much of the most experienced customer to do this kind of work to help them figure out how to make these Acronis programs work as advertised. They need to integrate better, easy to use diagnostics right into their programs.

Don't misunderstand, I love the program(s) and recommend them highly, but they need to get them to work on all machines even newer ones. When we upgrade our machines from old to new -we are working w newer technology.

UPDATE (Nov 2010): If you choose Disk Director SAFE Version -it will work on a lot more computers. The problem is caused by video compatibility. Also there is an newer version available.

I used Acronis Director Suite to resize my partitions. The resizing went find but once I shut down the computer I was unable to restart. It was necessary to reformat the partition and reinstall the OS. Unhappy customer.

I bought this after several failed attempts to duplicate my boot partition for backup purposes useing Symantec Partition Magic 8. This product not only did the job quickly, but easier than PM8, and it supports UBS/Firewire drives when using the bootable disk (which PM8 does not).

You can create bootable disks from the downloadable version of this software, and it has a full graphical interface which is easy to use, and worked flawlessly for my needs. Highly recommended.

I had no problems at creating partitions with this product, but this software is specially dangerous if you want to set up a triple boot (xp, vista, linux) the easy way (using acronis OS selector that comes with this suite). I got an error saying that acronis couldn't find a file, so I could not boot at all and I had to format my PC

I found that Disk Director Suite worked for expanding the partition on my C: drive without any problems. The interface is all menu driven and very simple to use. I did not try to use the software for anything else and cannot comment on the complaints reported by others on this site. If you only want to expand partitions, as I did, the software worked great and was priced lower than the competitive products.